Tribological Properties of Calotropis Procera Natural Fiber Reinforced Hybrid Epoxy Composites

Abstract

Natural fibers are widely used for reinforcement in polymer composite materials and proved to be effectively replacing synthetic fiber reinforced polymer composites to some extent in applications like domestic, automotive and lower end aerospace parts. The natural fiber reinforced composites are environment friendly, have high strength to weight ratio as well as specific strengths comparable with synthetic glass fiber reinforced composites. In the present work, hybrid epoxy composites were fabricated using calotropis procera and glass fibers as reinforcement by hand lay-up method. The fibre reinforcement in epoxy matrix was maintained at 20 wt%. In 20 wt% reinforcement of fibre, the content of calotropis procera and glass fibre were varied from 5, 10, 15 and 20 wt%. The dry sliding wear test as per ASTM G99 and three body abrasive wear test as per ASTM G65 were conducted to find the tribological properties by varying speed, load, distance and abrasive size. The hybrid composite having 5 wt% calotropis procera and 15 wt% glass fibre showed less wear loss in hybrid composites both in sliding wear test as well as in abrasive wear test which is comparable with 20 wt% glass fibre reinforced epoxy composite which marked very low wear loss. The SEM analysis was carried out to study the worn out surfaces of dry sliding wear test and three body abrasive wear test specimens.

Advances in Phytochemistry, Textile and Renewable Energy Research for Industrial Growth

“…It was observed that fibres treated by microwave irradiation at 385 watts for 8 minutes were entirely damaged and were discarded for they could not be analysed. These variations and differences could be ascribed to the exposure of the inner central lumen of the fibre which may affect the fibre and reduction in fibre diameter due to the loss of weight due to the removal of carbonaceous materials after treatment (Imoisili et al, 2018;Raghu & Goud, 2019) The tenacity (in cN/Tex) of the treated and untreated Calotropis procera bast fibres were also determined and the mean tenacity of the untreated Calotropis procera bast fibres was found to be 37.88 cN/Tex. The highest mean tenacity of 72.06 cN/Tex was recorded for Calotropis procera bast fibres treated in 5% w/v alkali solution for 1 hour while the lowest mean tenacity of 28.79 cN/Tex was recorded for Calotropis procera bast fibres treated in 5% w/v alkali solution for 3 hours.…”

An artificial neural network and Taguchi prediction on wear characteristics ofKenaf–Kevlarfabric reinforced hybrid polyester composites

“…The same has been studied through Taguchi's L9 orthogonal array method. Raghu et al [ 36 ] focused on wear performance evaluation of calotropis procera/glass fiber reinforced hybrid composites, where the varying percentage (5% of natural fiber), 15% and 20% of glass fiber in hybrid composite showed less wear rate.…”